


Endlessly Caving In

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Series: Burn Our Horizons [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, Gen, Grief, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-23 07:22:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8318965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: Padmé hosts a nightmare, and chooses to become one.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Or, the origin story of Padmé's war brands.

"Lady Amidala," a grunt says, and Padmé flinches.  _Queen_ Amidala,  _Senator_ Amidala, but never  _Lady_ Amidala - elected, elected,  _dictated._

"Lady Amidala," a grunt says, and Padmé turns. "Lord Vader has requested that you join him tonight - the Emperor will be visiting."

 

* * *

 

 

The Emperor was once Sheev, a guiding hand in Padmé's days as a newcomer to Coruscanti politics. He was once kind and warm, teasing and smiling as often as he frowned and offered censure.

Now he is a thing that makes shadows even of suns, and sons, and ruins everything he touches. Padmé wonders if he has always ruined all upon which he lays his hands, and wonders if she was only the first in a long line of casualties.

Vader wheezes while she picks at the luxuriant spread on their dining table, set in the style of Alderaan.

The tiny weight of her Alderaanian communicator drags her corewards by the neck, burning through her breastbone where it hangs on a long black ribbon.

Everything she wears now is black - she is not of high military rank, and so white is not a viable choice, and the red of the Emperor's personal guard is considered beneath her. So it is black, and she is a match to her mad ruin of a husband and his madder, ruinous master.

"You are very quiet, my dear," the Emperor says, reaching around the round table to touch her tight-held hand. His fingers are warm, his skin soft and smooth, and she wishes they were not. His hands should be cold, his skin clammy and slick, like a corpse, like the dark he has spread over the Senate.

She pulls back slowly, so as to avoid insult, and smiles. Her smiles have shifted, she knows, sees it in the faces of her rare few friends. It is a thing of shadows now, just as she has become - a knife in the shadows, she hopes, because if she cannot be dangerous then she is nothing at all, not anymore.

 

* * *

 

 

"I will train you to fight," Ahsoka says when next they meet in Bail's other office. She has a bandage of black linen wrapped around her arm, an archaic measure but a cheap one, and it reeks of something floral and sweet whenever it moves - Padmé thinks for a moment of some purple flower, but cannot name it.

"It would be good for you to train," Bail says, folding his arms and looking at her with a level of concern that makes her feel achingly guilty. Unless she is caught in an attempt on the Emperor's life, Vader will find some way to spare her, but her friends have no such obsessive guard dogs. 

"I know how to fight," she says, because she does. She trained with her handmaidens, she trained with- with her husband, before his death. With his friend, who was her friend as well, whose friend she was first.

Obi-Wan trained her in many things. He is gone now, and she misses him as much for the hope he would give her as for anything else.

No, that is a lie. She misses him for the balance he gave Anakin, which failed so quickly when he was away for so short a time.

"I know how to fight," she says, folding her own arms and feeling how frail they have become, how fragile  _she_ has become. 

_Dangerous, or nothing at all._

"Teach me how to fight."

Vader does not question it when she begins to spend more time with Mon Mothma - they were always friends, after all, and Mon has long been under suspicion as a rebel. What better way to dissuade her disloyalty than to have Vader's own Lady keep an eye?

Mon holds her, when she weeps. For her babies, for the galaxy, and even for Anakin, when her moods dip dark enough.

In Mon's apartment, with the help of clever little droids who shield and deflect and project tame imaginings onto the screens built into Mon's windows, Padmé learns to fight under Ahsoka's instruction.

It is endless, Ahsoka merciless, and Padmé relentless.

If she relents, then he has  _won._ She is no longer sure who  _he_ is - the Emperor, Anakin, Vader, cowardly Obi-Wan - but she will defeat him. She will be stronger than any of them.

She has to be, or she lost her babies for nothing.

 

* * *

 

Mon wears white, and sits like a beam of moonlight between Padmé and Bail, celestial and serene while they brood like black holes on either side of her.

"Smile, my friends," Mon says, a breath and an echo of laughter, in that curious way of hers. "We have an audience."

True enough, some cadre of cronies has settled at the table nearest theirs in the Senate lounge. All dressed in layer upon layer of black, a cowled hood here and a sweeping cape there, rigid shoulders to mimic the military uniforms, a curiously looping necklace inspired by the stormtroopers' helmets, any number of things to curry favour with the man who has deemed himself above all others.

Padmé's black clothes are severe, sharply tailored and functional before anything else, Bail's softened only by the sweep of his Alderaanian-cut cape, and neither of them have a taste for adornment anymore. 

Vader leaves so many gifts of jewellery on Padmé's table that she cannot wear any jewellery at all anymore. She especially cannot wear a necklace, not without phantom hands seizing her throat and  _squeezing._

The fools in their false jewels sneer when they see her glancing, but their confidence falls when her gaze does not.  _Lady Vader,_ she hears someone whisper, and feels sick.

 

* * *

 

 

She bloodies Ahsoka's mouth for the first time two years to the day after she woke up with Vader looming over her, and laughs.

"I never thought such a thing would be possible," she admits, looking at her leather-wrapped knuckles and feeling like one of the ruffians who used fight under the docks in Theed.  _Dangerous._ "You are a skillful teacher, Ahsoka."

"You are a furious pupil, Naberrie," Ahsoka says ruefully, wiping blood from her lip with the back of her hand. "If only you were Force sensitive, I could take you for an apprentice."

"And here I thought you walked out without being knighted, Mistress Tano," Mon says, mild as milk, and Ahsoka sticks out her tongue. "Had Senator Amidala been Force-sensitive, like as not  _you_ would have been the pupil, and she your master."

"I am older," Padmé points out, and Ahsoka sticks her tongue out again, this time at Padmé. "But less experienced, in this at least. Thank you, Ahsoka. I can never repay you."

"Hurt him," Ahsoka says, clasping Padmé's arm, wrist to wrist. "Hurt him, and help us win. I can ask no more."

 

* * *

 

 

"You are tired," Vader says, and Padmé flashes him the edge of her smile.

"Nightmares," she says, thin and taut, and she thinks that he recoils - it is so hard to tell, in the armour. "It is nothing."

_Ahsoka_ , she wants to tell him.  _Your precious Snips has become my teacher. Together, we will destroy you._

But he would never believe her, and the Emperor would convince him that such ravings are a sign that her mind has snapped.

Best hold, and wait. It will keep.

 

* * *

 

 

When next the Emperor dines with them, he tells Vader the tale of the the Elders, the first conquerors of Naboo, long since lost to fates unknown.

Padmé knows these stories, and told them to Anakin a thousand thousand heartbeats and more ago. Vader drinks them in as if unknown, and she is glad of it - it helps, to keep her husband and her jailer apart in her mind. It hurts less.

She climbed the statues and temples they left behind, when she was a child - she and Sola used race, used see who could climb farthest fastest, clambering over a pillar here and a statue there.

Jar Jar had once confided in her some secrets the Gungans had of the Elders, secrets he was not supposed to share, and she remembers them now. It is easier to remember than to listen, because all the Emperor sees in the Elders is a lesson to be learned, about how carefully power must be guarded.

Padmé remembers Jar Jar telling her of beautiful art the Gungans keep hidden deep in their cities, art of the Elders in their prime.

_"Thesa brands are the mark of a warrior,"_ he had explained, pointing here and there at the holo.  _"Fierce fighters, and only the fiercest got to be marked."_

How hard would it be, Padmé wonders, to find someone willing to brand her as the danger she must be?

Ahsoka will know. If not Ahsoka, then some of Bail's grimy contacts. Someone will know, and then, so will she.

_Never nothing,_ she thinks, sipping the bloody red wine and thinking of Ahsoka's bloodied smile.  _Dangerous, as only I can be._

 

 


End file.
